How Western Dig­i­tal Cre­ated A Proac­tive Stor­age Back­bone For Mat­ri­mony.com

Data is very crit­i­cal to en­ter­prises and they are con­stantly look­ing at com­pe­tent so­lu­tions to store their data

The In­dian cul­ture has al­ways looked at mar­riage as a sa­cred cer­e­mony, per­formed in com­plete gusto with a week-long cel­e­bra­tion on both the bride and the groom’s side. As tech­nol­ogy dis­rupts al­most ev­ery as­pect of our lives, mar­riages weren’t left un­touched. In 2001, a sig­na­ture in­ter­net con­glom­er­ate Mat­ri­mony.com was launched that man­aged mul­ti­ple brands in on­line mar­riage and match­mak­ing ser­vices. To­day, it is one of the fastest grow­ing or­ga­ni­za­tion both on­line and of ine and they con­tinue to be known as pi­o­neers in in­no­va­tion, tech­ni­cal ex­cel­lence and en­trepreneur­ship.

This Chennai based firm is the largest match­mak­ing web­site in the coun­try with over 3.2 mil­lion users across its net­work of over 300 web­sites. Re­cently the busi­ness ex­panded and Mat­ri­mony.com ven­tured into the sec­tor of wed­ding ser­vices, one of the key ver­ti­cal un­der which is Mat­ri­mony Pho­tog­ra­phy which makes use of legacy stor­age sys­tems spread across 4 states in the coun­try for man­ag­ing their client data and videos. How­ever, this busi­ness along with the var­i­ous ser­vices that they now of­fer gen­er­ate a huge amount of data, that was af­fect­ing the per­for­mance and avail­abil­ity of these sys­tems as well. As a so­lu­tion to this they im­ple­mented Western Dig­i­tal’s archival stor­age plat­forms for im­proved per­for­mance.

CHAL­LENGES FACED BY BHARATMATRIMONY.COM

Mat­ri­mony.com over the years have man­aged to ex­pand their of­fer­ings across In­dia and world­wide, with ser­vices in­clud­ing Elite Mat­ri­mony, Mat­ri­mony Pho­tog­ra­phy, Com­mu­nity Mat­ri­mony, Mat­ri­mony Di­rec­tory, Mat­ri­mony Bazaar, Mat­ri­mony Man­dap etc.

With busi­ness ex­pan­sion, comes the need for the or­ga­ni­za­tion’s IT in­fra­struc­ture to evolve in the same pace and scale. Mat­ri­monyPho­tog­ra­phy, one of our key busi­ness ver­ti­cals and through this unit we of­fer pho­tog­ra­phy ser­vices across South In­dia. The com­pany pro­vides a range of spe­cial­ized pho­tog­ra­phy and videog­ra­phy ser­vices for wed­dings cov­er­ing ev­ery­thing from on-lo­ca­tion shoot­ing to tak­ing ae­rial shots with a re­mote-con­trolled Heli­cam. Close to 1000 events are hosted ev­ery month in ev­ery lo­ca­tion and more than 10TB of data is gen­er­ated. As their ser­vices be­came more pop­u­lar the stor­age needs also grew.

“The first chal­lenge we faced was that the legacy stor­age sys­tems did not have suf­fi­cient ca­pac­ity to scale as per our in­creas­ing busi­ness needs. Al­though we ex­plored many stor­age op­tions, de­ploy­ments were slow, and scal­a­bil­ity was lim­ited by space, power and cool­ing con­straints in their data cen­ters. In short, per­for­mance and avail­abil­ity started to take a hit and that af­fected the cus­tomer ex­pe­ri­ence,” said Mu­gun­thanSoundarara­jan, Vice Pres­i­dent - Tech­nol­ogy - Mat­ri­mony.com.

SO­LU­TIONS AND OF­FER­INGS CATER TO THE RE­QUIRE­MENTS OF MAT­RI­MONY.COM

Mat­ri­mony Pho­tog­ra­phy is one among its cus­tom­ized so­lu­tions, and as the busi­ness grew across cities, the need for a high-per­for­mance data stor­age so­lu­tion be­came crit­i­cal to se­curely store the im­mense footage ac­cu­mu­lated from each wed­ding.

Ini­tially, the com­pany de­ployed sev­eral NAS boxes which came with dif­fer­ent op­er­at­ing sys­tems (OS) and ar­chi­tec­tures. Data avail­abil­ity and through­put be­came a sig­nif­i­cant chal­lenge. As the num­ber of NAS boxes grew, man­ag­ing, stor­ing and re­triev­ing data be­came dif­fi­cult, time con­sum­ing and its in­ter­nal team had to be ex­perts in work­ing on mul­ti­ple OSs.

“We came across Western Dig­i­tal’s port­fo­lio and eval­u­ated their so­lu­tions for im­prov­ing the per­for­mance and avail­abil­ity of our rich and un­struc­tured data such as pho­to­graphs, videos (footage) in their stor­age sys­tems. We dis­cov­ered the HGST 4U60G2 Stor­age Plat­form, a high-ca­pac­ity, en­ter­prise-class so­lu­tion, which was apt to solve is­sues of scal­a­bil­ity, speed, power con­sump­tion all at rea­son­able costs. This de­vice’s SAS port for server con­nec­tions helped elim­i­nate the net­work bot­tle­neck and al­lowed for a much smaller foot­print in the data cen­ter. With Western Dig­i­tal’s stor­age plat­form to help re­duce the num­ber OSs and sys­tems we need to use, we up­load sig­nif­i­cantly more videos ev­ery­day than we were ca­pa­ble of be­fore de­ploy­ment,” says Mu­gun­than.

Vivek Tyagi, Di­rec­tor of Busi­ness De­vel­op­ment, Em­bed­ded & En­ter­prise, Western Dig­i­tal said “We learnt about the chal­lenges Mat­ri­mony.com was fac­ing with the grow­ing num­ber of NAS boxes. Man­age­abil­ity and com­plex­ity had be­come a se­ri­ous is­sue for them. The NAS boxes in use was be­ing out­paced by their data and sys­tem re­quire­ments, re­sult­ing in data stor­ing and re­triev­ing be­com­ing a te­dious and a time con­sum­ing task. We sug­gested the HGST 4U60G2 Stor­age Plat­form, a high-ca­pac­ity, en­ter­prise-class so­lu­tion to ad­dress the prob­lem. On de­ploy­ment we saw the plat­form help re­solve their is­sues of scal­a­bil­ity, speed, power con­sump­tion and cost. The 12Gb/s SAS port fea­ture for server con­nec­tions helped elim­i­nate the net­work bot­tle­neck. The den­sity of the so­lu­tion al­lowed for a smaller foot­print in the data cen­ter and the so­lu­tion was de­ployed in all 4 lo­ca­tions: Chennai, Andhra Pradesh, Kar­nataka and Kerala. Mat­ri­mony.com is now ex­plor­ing the use of SSDs in the Stor­age Plat­form for even greater per­for­mance.”

ARCHIVAL STOR­AGE PLAT­FORMS

We now live in a world where ter­abytes and petabytes of data needs to be stored and re­tained for a long pe­riod of time. This data needs to be pre­served and ac­ces­si­ble at any point. Data is very crit­i­cal to en­ter­prises and they are con­stantly look­ing at com­pe­tent so­lu­tions to store their data.

“We at Western Dig­i­tal un­der­stand the grow­ing needs of our con­sumers and of­fer them a large archival stor­age so­lu­tion called Ac­tiveS­cale. This archival so­lu­tion is pri­mar­ily uti­lized in the me­dia and en­ter­tain­ment in­dus­try, where we see the need among large pro­duc­tion houses. They need to store petabytes of video footage that needs to be pre­served over a long pe­riod of time. An­other sec­tor that ne­ces­si­tates this so­lu­tion is the Life Sci­ence in­dus­try. Tons of data is cre­ated in this seg­ment and it needs to be pre­served to be able to be re­trieved later, for anal­y­sis and stud­ies. Apart from these two seg­ments, BFSI (Bank­ing, Fi­nan­cial ser­vices and In­sur­ance) also gen­er­ates large vol­umes of crit­i­cal data that needs to be pre­served due to reg­u­la­tory re­quire­ments. Our Ac­tiveS­cale so­lu­tion pro­vides the ca­pa­bil­ity to de­ploy and scale eas­ily, with ex­treme dura­bil­ity, easy man­age­ment pro­ce­dure and ex­cel­lent To­tal cost of own­er­ship (TCO),” Vivek added.